San Francisco Opera: Beethoven & Falla

In recent seasons Music Director Eun Sun Kim has led the San Francisco Opera Orchestra in one-off concerts featuring the symphonic repertory; the most recent of these, featuring works by Manuel de Falla as well as the Beethoven 5, was the first of these I have attended. It was an enjoyable evening, & the Opera House was full & enthusiastic.

For the opener, mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack came out, looking exceedingly glam in a low-cut gown of a deep iridescent purple, with ruffles cascading down one side & her dark hair swept up, to perform de Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (Seven Popular Songs). I don't know how many other members of the audience had these songs in the back of their minds, memories conjured up through Mack's warm, rich voice. Though they sound typically "Spanish", they also evoke different moods & modes, from the wistful regrets of El paño moruno (The Moorish Cloth), about a once-fine cloth for sale that goes for a lower price because it is stained (Ay!) – draw your own metaphorical conclusions – to the bitter edge of lost love in Canción (Song), but I found the loveliest to be Nana (Lullaby), a soothing & sad midpoint to the set.

I would happily have heard more of Mack, but after her seven songs she left the stage, & we were given a Suite from de Falla's ballet music for  El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat). Again, a piece evocative of an idealized Spain of an earlier time, a vaguely foreign world of swirling flamenco dancers, in its colors & rhythms. Kim shaped a lively performance. In the full ballet there is a witty quotation of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth, which she had worked back into this suite: a preview of coming attractions, as it were.

The opening of the Beethoven 5 is of course possibly the most famous moment in "classical" music, known to those who know nothing else, similar to "To be or not to be" for classic theater, a phrase similar in its stripped-down daring, its challenge to our existential being. I can't remember the last time I heard the Beethoven 5 played live! This is true of many of the "standards" – how often have we actually heard them live, & how recently? That's especially true if you're a long-time concert-goer, who probably, after many decades of attendance, & in the face of dwindling time, money, & energy, automatically avoids these standards. And then something happens, & we end up hearing them again, & we wonder why we don't listen to them all the time, as they have so much to give. If you keep house the way I do, you frequently have the experience of coming across something you only vaguely remembered that you owned, & finding in it, as if it were Christmas morning, the enchantments of new discovery. Revisiting the basic repertory is like that.

The performance struck me as vivid & full of tensile energy, fleet rather than ponderous. There was enthusiastic applause after the first two movements (I don't know if people were unaware of not clapping between movements, or if, in the style of our day, they didn't care about that convention); as the third movement moved right into the finale, there was no interruption then for applause, & we moved right into the blazing conclusion. Bits of this symphony have floated through my mind since I heard this performance. Through a developing struggle to some sort of breakthrough: it's an encouraging message for us, in our troubled times. I was very glad to hear this music again, played so beautifully, & I hope I never again take Beethoven or this symphony for granted.

San Francisco Symphony: Runnicles conducts Berg & Mahler

Last Saturday I was at the second of three performances of Alban Berg's Seven Early Songs & the Mahler 1, with Donald Runnicles leading the San Francisco Symphony. It was a magnificent performance of an excellent program (such are starting to stand out on the Symphony schedule, crowded as it is with attempts to turn these superb musicians into a back-up band for pop groups or soundtrack-suppliers for recent movie hits that already come with perfectly fine soundtracks), & a welcome return to this area for Runnicles, fondly remembered by many (including me) for his work across the street at the Opera House.

The program opened, as you might expect, with the Berg songs, with mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts as soloist. She swept out looking exceedingly glam in her broad-hemmed pink gown. I don't know why the pink surprised me (pleasantly), but it did. Perhaps at some level I was expecting something more somber, for no particular reason. Roberts was in splendid voice, rich & intimate in these crepuscular & shifting songs. As anyone who has been in Davies knows, it is what is kindly called a barn: a vast, not very attractive space with notoriously iffy acoustics. The miracle of this performance was the intimacy Roberts & Runnicles with the orchestra created, the almost hushed immediacy of a direct, heart-to-heart communication, drawing in even those rows back from the stage. I always love the works of the Second Viennese School, but this was really a performance to cherish.

After the intermission we had the Mahler 1, sometimes still known as the Titan, though it's a nickname the composer jettisoned. The familiar music unfolded magnificently, implanting itself newly into my memory (I've been replaying parts of it in my mind for days). What struck me most about the whole thing was the flow & the timing: it never seemed too fast, too slow, too hurried, stretched out, but all perfectly balanced. I loved it, but I have to say, I preferred the Berg. Perhaps the triumphant overcoming of obstacles at the symphony's end, however inspiring to listen to & even theatrically thrilling to see (when the horn players stand), – the "Titan"-esque romantic heroness of it – that doesn't quite resonate with me, especially in this moment, so grim politically as well as in other ways. It is the questing, inclusive, neurotic Mahler that I respond to more, at least these days, & these are qualities found with greater strength, I think, in Mahler's other works.

My anxieties aside, I was deeply grateful to have heard this performance. And of course the subtext here is "the San Francisco Symphony is not doomed" (or maybe, "the San Francisco Symphony is not doomed – yet"); its current administration will forever be branded as the ones who didn't bother to keep Esa-Pekka Salonen,  & it remains to be seen where they'll steer this ship, but in the meantime, we are given this generous & triumphant performance.

Salonen's Last Stand, Mahler's Resurrection

Last night I was back at Davies Hall for the first in departing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen's final run of performances, a three-concert run of Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection. I was there once again courtesy of Lisa Hirsch, & I am particularly grateful as the Symphony's Uber-style surge pricing means single tickets for these concerts are going for astronomical sums, which is not surprising given this might be our last chance to hear what one of the great conductors of our time can do with our orchestra..

The Resurrection, a massive work, an emotional landmark for many symphony-goers, is always a special occasion, though of course as Salonen's last stand, these performances are particularly fraught. I assume the repertory was set before Symphony management made the unexplained & inexplicable decision to let their prize music director go, but the circumstances made the choice both ironic & hopeful.

The hall was packed & the audience vociferous in its applause & cheers for Salonen & Co every chance they got (not that there wasn't some of the usual bad behavior – very loud coughs, items dropped, & one man down front who had to be cautioned about his cell phone use during the performance by an usher with a sign; people are going to people, no matter how special the occasion). And this was a special occasion. The applause for the conductor's entry were in support; the applause & cheers for his final bows were in tribute. This was a stupendous performance on everyone's part: the orchestra, the chorus & their director (Jenny Wong), the soloists (soprano Heidi Stober & mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke), as well as Salonen. Given what I'll keep calling the circumstances, & despite or perhaps really because of the magnificent artistic achievement of all the musicians concerned, it was difficult not to feel that the performance was at some level the musical equivalent of the fuck-you dress.

As you can probably tell from my attempts to marshal praise-words into some sort of coherent form, this performance – strong, supple, soaring in its clarity & emotion – was a glowing one. I've been to other powerful Mahler performances that, while memorable, also left me feeling bludgeoned, not lifted up as this one did. This symphony is a tricky ship to sail! To switch metaphors, it was like seeing a familiar Old Master painting after a scrupulous cleaning, revealing shades of color & swathes of details that had been hidden under wax & varnish, waiting to be revealed. Particular instruments (the harps, the organ, the timpani) spoke with an invigorating clarity & force, but also with a tenderness, I hadn't recalled. The slow still entry of the chorus was like the first rays of sunlight after a stormy (picturesque, but stormy) night. Cooke, whom I believe I once described as "reliably radiant", came through as usual, with a voice like the warmth of a tender embrace. Stober soared along with the sinuous musical lines. The chorus ascended as one, & brought us with them. Requiems often try to duplicate the trumpets of the Last Judgment, but this was the thunderous opening of the final ascension. And this transitory & electric cathedral, with its vast perspective of arching architecture, its colors & pillars, &, this being Mahler, its gargoyles, had been summoned from the score as by a magician's wand by the conductor's baton, floating over us, suspended, giving us the usual dilemma: what do you do after hearing such a revelation?

I've read through what I've written a couple of times, wondering if I should tone it down, tamp down the extravagance, prune a few adjectives. But why? Ultimately, we go to live performances to have an evening like this, one that will live in memory as a justification for the time & money we spend on this strange hobby of going to sit in the dark, listening to sounds that will pass away just as we (often barely) comprehend them. So let my babbling stand as a monument to the why & wherefore of a concert-going life.

Enough of my raving. Re-entry has, as usual, been difficult. This was a great evening, & as for what happens to the Symphony after this, well, resurrection is always the hope.

Penultimate Salonen: Strauss, Sibelius, & Smith at the San Francisco Symphony

Thursday night I was at Symphony Hall for Esa-Pekka Salonen's penultimate stand as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. (I was there courtesy of Lisa Hirsch; check here for her review of this concert.) He was conducting a meaty program bookended by two Richard Strauss tone poems (Don Juan & Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks); in between came Sibelius's 7th Symphony to close the first half & then, after the intermission, the world premiere of a Symphony commission, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith.

As locals are all too well aware, Symphony management made the boneheaded decision, for reasons never really stated beyond the usual "different artistic visions", to let their prize Music Director go. Overt demonstrations are not allowed, but the audience showed its support for Salonen with on-going applause & cheers for him every chance they got – as he walked on, as he bowed after a piece, as he walked off; when the concert ended, the applause extended well beyond the usual.

In recent years I've sort of lost my taste for Richard Strauss, but Thursday's performance made me wonder why, as the lush, dizzying strains of Don Juan unfolded (sounding occasionally like outtakes from Rosenkavalier, suitably enough given the eroticism pervading both works), with just enough of a zing of danger & a shot of the eerie to make it clear this was not just any lover's rhapsody but the story of a specific lover, the obsessive, haunted, & hunted Don Juan. Well, as they say, that's why they play the games. It's always good to give what we think we know a reality check.

That was followed by the Sibelius 7, a relatively compact piece. A few weeks ago at the Symphony, Dalia Stasevska closed her concert with a vigorous Sibelius 5, a work that rises majestically on muscular wings; the 7th, by contrast, seems rooted monumentally in place, like a vast granite mountain, undecorated by frivolous little flowers & suchlike; what chips & fragments skitter away from it come from the same substantial source.

That was a lot to mull over during intermission, with more to come – in fact, with a highlight to come, as a world premiere always strikes me as the highlight, or maybe I should say potential highlight, of a concert. But before we could hear the piece, the composer was brought out to talk.

As I've often said, I dislike such talks from the stage, & though there is a Romantic interest in hearing an artist discussing his or her creation, their comments are as often as not partial, pale, even a bit misleading (pushing us to look for one element over other, potentially to us more interesting, elements). After all, if a piece could be summed up in words, why write the piece? If you're a composer, you must feel that music conveys things words cannot, & this would be true even if you were a composer also gifted in writing & speaking (& not all are, of course; the "talk to the audience" is a bit of outreach, like using social media, that gets foisted on all composers these days, regardless of their level of interest & skill in these tasks, which are tangential to their main interest, which is writing music). And most of the material given in these speeches is usually available in the program anyway, so it's a twice-told tale for me.

Smith started with a gracious thank-you to Salonen & the orchestra; as a local composer, she grew up hearing the San Francisco Symphony, so it was a particular thrill, she said, for her to work with them. For the rest of her speech, she rather brilliantly evaded any discussion of the music (which needs to speak for itself) by telling us what rewilding is. But – I already know what it is. And I'm all in favor of it! (In fact I wondered if I was more of a purist than Smith, who went on about bicycling, as bicyclists do, whereas I feel bikes are industrial products, mostly requiring paved roads, that, while not as bad as cars, are not as good as walking.) So all in favor, & that's all the more reason I don't need to hear about it when I'm in the cramped & uncomfortable seats of Davies Hall, feeling tired, & having already sat long enough so that my joints are hurting. And it's not Smith's problem that some words she emphasized (like "joy" & "community"), while important & powerful, are also trendy PR-ready buzzwords that set my teeth on edge.

Am I the only one who felt this way? Very likely. Is it a bit ridiculous that it took a while for me to let the music, once it started, get past my mild irritation with the speech? Again, very likely. But there it is. These things affect us, just as much as whether the seats are comfortable or how we're feeling physically. And though Smith did talk about a rewilding project she had recently worked on (converting an old airport runway up in Seattle – information which was also available in the program), she did not explain how the concept of rewilding affected the piece or her conception of it. I heard nature in the music, but not nature being reborn, or wilderness coming out of humanity's wreckage.

Not that that really matters. An arbitrary title can direct you for only so long before one's own reactions to the music take over. And once I got past my usual irritation at the talk, & my irritation that I was irritated, I loved the piece, a rich, striking profusion of sounds new & compelling. There is much frittering percussion, & then great swoops of sound, like a rushing strong wind, or maybe a warning siren. Some of the sounds are unusual – a percussionist was snapping twigs at some points. This made a noticeable number of audience members laugh – not in a derisive way, but in a way that still puzzled me. Snapping a twig doesn't seem particularly comical to me, though apparently it did to some in the context of a symphony orchestra, but haven't we learned from John Cage & Co that any sound from any source could be incorporated into performance?

According to the program, Rewilding is (this is very precise) 23 minutes long, making it the longest of the evening's four selections. The time flew by, as did the rich & redolent sounds. Though a made object involving an incredible degree of skill on the parts of both composer & performers, & sophisticated "technology" (in the form of musical instruments), the piece conveyed a refreshing sense of being out in nature, aware, taking in the nature-made sounds around us. Perhaps Rewilding isn't such an arbitrary title; maybe it refers to what happens in the soul of the listener.

Rewilding is exactly the sort of thing – a new, substantial, thoughtful, & gorgeous piece designed for a large orchestra – that I fear we will see much less of after Salonen goes, being swept aside by lush orchestrations of pop hits & live performances of film scores to currently popular movies that already have perfectly fine recorded soundtracks.

After Smith's powerful piece, it seemed like another of Till Eulenspiegel's pranks to detain us longer with his antics, but there it was, & it turned out to be giddy, zingy fun, kind of like (& I mean this as a compliment) the score of the most luxe Warner Brothers cartoon ever.

Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra: Elgar, Wu, & Tippett

Yesterday afternoon I was at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley for the third & final performance by the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra of their latest program, Voices of War, a topic sadly as relevant as ever; in fact, as Music Director Ming Luke told us, though this concert might be seen as a response to the world's current conflagrations, these pieces had actually been scheduled years ago, only to be disrupted by the pandemic.

The first piece, Elgar's Sospiri, was a pleasant surprise, as it was not listed on the website description of the concert. It is a meditation for harp & orchestra, provoked by the First World War, & I'm surprised it isn't better known, as it is reminiscent of Barber's celebrated Adagio for Strings, with a similar dignified sense of mounting sorrow. Perhaps it's the piece's relative brevity, & its comparative emotional complexity (it doesn't build on a single subject as the Barber does, but moves meditatively around) that render it less suitable for public commemorations. It did seem a very personal statement, despite the large forces involved. I was glad to "discover" it.

The Elgar was followed by the wind blows full of sand, a setting by Sam Wu for chorus & orchestra of Li Po's Lament of the Frontier Guard, as rendered into English by Ezra Pound. Wu did not set the entire poem, but made effective use of large sections & fragments of it, which helped emphasize the dislocated & desolate effect of the work. The setting is bleak but beautiful as a desert is beautiful; waves of sound sweep forward, intersected with fragile, almost scratchy effects from solo strings. The chorus is sometimes united, sometimes halved, singing over & under each other in a sort of call-&-response way. as they contemplate the yellowing grasses & the chilly expanse of bones "white with a thousand frosts". As the words describe the imperial anger & brutal battles that left so many bodies to waste in this distant field, the music grows stridently martial, with the sort of harsh indifferent sarcasm of the marches in Shostakovich's symphonies. The battle recedes but the bones remain; the chorus's final word is forgotten. This powerfully effective piece was commissioned by the BCCO & given its world premiere in these performances. Wu was present & came on stage to an enthusiastic ovation. This piece wsa conducted by the group's Assistant Conductor, Samantha Burgess; Music Director Ming Luke directed the Elgar & the final piece, Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time.

Tippett wrote the piece to express his profound anguish over the events surrounding Kristallnacht, but his aim was to write a piece about the universal underlying situation (the violence provoked by oppressing one group of people, including the violent force used to suppress their resistance) rather than the facts behind this particular situation: thus instead of Herschel Grynszpan, whose killing of a German diplomat in Paris was used as an excuse by the Nazis for a night of terror against German Jews, we have The Boy, & his Mother, & an unnamed power oppressing an unidentified people. They could be Jews, but they could also be Black Americans; the libretto mentions "pograms in the east, lynchings in the west", &, just as Bach used Lutheran hymns in his chorales, Tippett widens his musical & emotional net by using Black American spirituals for several of the choruses.

Tippett wrote his own libretto, at T S Eliot's suggestion. His lines may not have the rhythmic power of Eliot's work, but they make up for any lack of elegance with sincerity & directness, though that's not the same thing as simplicity; given his lifelong interest in Jungian psychology, Tippett references our shadow selves & other underlying psychological structures as he looks forward to some sort of future human reconciliation. Tippett's attempt in his libretto to create a universal situation certainly struck me as superior to Amin Maalouf's similar attempt for Adriana Mater, which has extraordinarily powerful music by Saariaho in the service of a clumsy & reductive libretto. Tippett was wise to write an oratorio, in which the action is interspersed with meditations / interpretations & suggestive emblems, rather than a more overtly dramatic opera.

The BCCO had certainly lined up a powerhouse quartet of soloists: soprano Brandie Sutton, alto Sara Couden, tenor Jonathan Elmore, & bass Kirk Eichelberger. Sutton sang her lines, which included The Mother's, with a soaring & anguished purity; Elmore was the plangent & earnest Son. Couden gave conviction & power to her meditations, & Eichelberger stentorian authority to his. The whole concert was pretty remarkable; I'll admit that I only recently found out about this group, though it's been around for nearly 60 years, &, as this program showed, it does excellent work.

The concert was free & open to the public, which is also a pretty remarkable thing, but though I understand the need to ask for money, I wish that particular speech had been placed somewhere other than right after Wu's piece, as it jolted us right out of the powerful effect he had created. We get bumped back into reality soon enough.

The program book mentioned that Tippett's use of spirituals in A Child of Our Time has "drawn charges of cultural appropriation". I find his use of them respectful & empathetic, & a way of incorporating the history of American racism as part of the universal struggle he is trying to depict. What's his alternative? Ignoring the oppression of Black Americans? Should he, a gentile from England, also not have been moved to compose by the plight of Jews in Germany? Cultural appropriation is a real thing, but also a complicated thing, & it's a term that gets tossed around more easily than it should, without much thought or distinction. The history of culture is the history of "appropriation": borrowing, outright theft, misunderstandings, re-interpretations, revisions, an empathetic realization that a culture that is not your own is saying something to you . . . The alternative seems to be a reductive insistence on a mostly imaginary cultural purity, & of course "cultural purity", unpolluted by foreign influences/appropriations, is a central tenet of fascism. & as the program also mentions, Pound, whose influential version of Li Po's poem was the basis for Wu's powerful work, was a fascist & an anti-Semite. Yet his version (or appropriation) of the Chinese poet speaks with harrowing truth about the effects of authoritarian violence, & Wu, an Australian of Chinese descent now active in the United States, made it the source for an excellent new work. It's a reminder that all we can do is try to make the best we can of a troubled & unsatisfying world.

New Century Chamber Orchestra launches its silver season

New Century Chamber Orchestra is turning 25 this year, and to mark this milestone they have christened this their Silver Season. The other major milestone they are marking is the ninth and final year of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's time as their Music Director, a term that has been marked by a higher profile for this fine ensemble as well as the very welcome Featured Composer Residency program, culminating each season in a new work written for the ensemble (on 16 May 2017 you can hear these works in the first of three final and farewell concerts).

Last Saturday I headed out to Herbst Theater in San Francisco to hear the first concert of their season. It opened with Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement), written by a youthful Webern for his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg (in a version for chamber orchestra prepared by Gerard Schwarz). It is a brief (roughly ten minute) but full and even lush piece, written when both composers were immersed in that late romantic style that is so replete in every way (size, sound, luxurious longing, impending sadness and exhaustion) that the only place to turn from it was to the bracing asperities that I at least love in the works of the Second Viennese School these composers are now mostly associated with. I hope it's not damning to call this piece tasteful, but there's always a sense of elegant restraint behind even its most voluptuous swellings. This was followed by Mozart's Piano Concerto No 13 in C Major, with soloist Inon Barnatan. He is sort of an elfin fellow, and the silver of the season also seemed appropriate for his silvery, mercurial touch; C major is seen as such a triumphant key, but that didn't seem quite what was going on in this delicate yet striking performance. The piano was situated so that Barnatan on his stool was just a few feet away from Salerno-Sonnenberg in her Concertmaster's seat. He frequently glanced over at her, and the two exchanged cues wordlessly. But when he was not looking at her, he did not look at us; instead, a smile of blissful distance on his face, he seemed to be floating off on effulgent clouds he himself was calling forth.

After the intermission, we had Philip Glass's Symphony No. 3. I am a long-time Glass fan, but I was a little mixed on this symphony, though the playing was, as is to be expected with this group, full and fine and thoughtful. The symphony is in the usual four movements, and though I found them all enjoyable enough it was only the third and longest movement that I really connected with. It is also the most "Philip-Glass-like" of the movements, which left me feeling dubious about myself, since I've always rejected "that performance didn't sound like [insert name of composer here: Beethoven, Prokofiev, Glass. . . ]" as a standard – why should people always "sound like" themselves? It's like those painters who have one technique and use it over and over, until it can seem more like a commercial gimmick than anything else. Nonetheless, here I was, most absorbed in the most Glass-like part of the work, feeling in it that undertow of melancholy I hear in his work, with the deep strings lamenting forward, overlaid with the plangent thrusts of Salerno-Sonnenberg's violin. The other movements seemed a bit more haphazard to me, a little less specific in what they summoned up, if you will.

The concert closed with Peter Heidrich's Variations on Happy Birthday, in which the familiar tune is treated in the styles of various composers and traditions, from Bach and Haydn to "film music" and jazz. It's a fun item, so I can see why they thought it would be, you know, fun to include it in the first concert of their 25th birthday season, but it seemed like a bit of a goof after the sort of pearly sadness that underlay the other pieces, though of course the playing was still on a high level. Salerno-Sonnenberg announced that they weren't playing all the variations and we could enjoy ourselves guessing which piece was supposed to be which composer, but I genuinely hate guessing games, which kind of blunted the edge of that for me. And I wonder how many of us would be able to detect a Max Reger parody (Variation IX) unless it was clearly labeled as such, though in general it's easy enough to hear roughly who or what is being parodied. Despite this there was much whispering around me from the previously attentive audience as they tried to pin each butterfly to the board. The young woman next to me asked several times to borrow my program. (Why not just listen? But I do realize it took me a long time to learn that,) Violinist Evan Price, whose birthday it was, did an elaborate solo. Someone behind me decided to chant his name. Some people tried clapping along during the "Hungarian" variation. None of these audience interventions really took off, though. It was not my favorite ending to an otherwise dreamy concert.

the Berkeley Symphony plays Ades & Tchaikovsky

Last Thursday I was at the Berkeley Symphony for their second concert of the season, a double bill featuring Asyla by Thomas Adès on the first half and the Tchaikovsky Pathétique on the second. Music Director Joana Carneiro conducted. Cavernous Zellerbach Hall was looking quite filled up; it's great to see a symphony drawing big crowds by featuring contemporary music, as the Berkeley Symphony regularly does. The concert opened with a couple of people speaking, which I mostly tuned out, because if they're not going to listen to me on the inadvisability of stage speechifying when your work-night concert doesn't even begin until the ridiculous hour of 8:00, then I'm not going to listen to them talk about . . . whatever it was they talked about. Acknowledgements, I think, and some stuff about the music, all of which was already in the program book.

I had braced myself for the chatting, because that just seems to be a thing they do over there, but once past that the concert was quite enjoyable. Asyla is a big piece, roughly half an hour of concentrated, forceful sounds. Adès wrote it in 1997, when he was moving from surprising prodigy to steady presence in the British new-music scene. The title is the plural of asylum and, we are told, can refer to an asylum as a place of refuge or to an insane asylum (which is another sort of refuge, if not for the inhabitants, then for the society that no longer has to deal with them). The title is significantly plural; there can be multiple refuges, multiple madhouses. This is part of the dramatic tension of the piece; you never are quite in a final refuge. It opens with fantastic percussion, sounding like a gamelan made out of pots and pans, and proceeds from there. The third of the four movements in particular is intense; it is the only one with a name as well as a number: Ecstasio. There's the emotional ecstasy, but also the drug – this movement is supposed to reflect an uneasy night in a nightclub. It's clear that something is going on here, but I wonder how many people would have figured "drugs in a night club" without the key provided by the program. And I wonder if I would have had the same reaction, which is that I was reminded of why I avoided all drugs after some obligatory and very very mild experimentation in my late teen years: the music portrayed the feeling of being trapped in your body, not in the way we're usually trapped in (or by) our bodies, but as if your body has been taken over by some sort of chemical or virus and you just have to curl up and wait it out (the pounding drums, the insistent high-pitched strings) until it passes. That may make the music sound unpleasant, which is not at all the case – the music is very powerfully capturing what (to me at least) is an unpleasant experience, surrendering control of your own body to something that's taken it over. It's quite stunning, and the players were exceptional.

Listening to the Pathétique in the light of Asyla brought out new elements in the familiar piece. It too oscillates wildly between emotional extremes, sighing out in exhaustion at the end. There was an interesting point in Thomas May's program article, which is that if the order of the final two movements had been switched, the symphony would have moved from the sense of exhaustion and anguish towards a triumphant, idealistic finale. This kind of technical change – switching the normal positions of the two types of movement – may seem like a fairly dry thing, but that's how artists produce discomfiting emotional realities.

The Berkeley Symphony's next performance will be 26 February. Carneiro will conduct Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, the Brahms 4, and the world premiere of the orchestral version of Jake Heggie's Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. The latter will feature the superb mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. You can find more information or buy tickets here.

The Czech Philharmonic at Cal Performances

Last Sunday afternoon was one of those recent days of disquieting beauty – November is supposed to be cold and rainy, and something feels awry when all is blue, balmy, and beautiful. There was comforting beauty in store at Zellerbach Hall, where I headed that afternoon to hear the Cal Performances's presentation of Jirí Belohlávek leading the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonic Choir (Lukáš Vasilek Choir Master) and four soloists in Dvorák's Stabat Mater, his epic setting of the old Latin prayer meditating on the Virgin Mary at the foot of her son's cross.

I'm surprised the piece isn't as well known as the Brahms and Verdi Requiems; it requires vast forces – the stage was packed – but it's a wonderful piece, and people want to hear it – the auditorium was also packed, and on such a lovely day. I've sometimes thought of compiling a list of words and phrases I've come to loathe, and accessible (as applied to the arts) would head the list – it always makes me feel like a scrawny baby bird mewling for mommy bird to chew up my worms for me – so I'll say that the piece is immediately emotionally available, and filled with melodies that flow and ebb like a melancholy sea; it creates a meditative and moving atmosphere and keeps you there for its ninety-minute duration.

The orchestra and chorus were both splendid, but I did go back-and-forth a bit about the soloists. I guess my favorite was the imposing bass Jan Martiník. I really liked tenor Jaroslav Brezina (oddly listed in the program as a baritone) but I always had the feeling he was singing Italian opera – that's not a bad thing, necessarily. It was just how his voice struck me, with its exclamatory heroic sound. Alto Dagmar Pecková seems a bit underpowered to me, though I heard from others who sat elsewhere (I was about halfway down the left-hand side of the orchestra) that her voice had more presence elsewhere. Soprano Lucie Silkenová had a lovely clear voice but sometimes it seemed a shade unsteady to me. But these are all quibbles. I've heard recordings of this piece but they never really came alive for me the way this performance did. The audience was spellbound and deeply attentive. The young woman down the row from me kept coughing loudly, but she did leave several times – but then she'd come back. I can't really blame her for wanting to hear the rest of the performance, though.

At the end there was an ardent ovation, one of the most striking I've heard recently. As his final gesture, the lights behind him giving him an aureole of white hair, Belohlávek held up his copy of the score. I love it when performers do that, giving the composer the final salute. When the audience started filing out I ran into a friend who raved about how pretty it all was. I think I'd have gone for a different word, but she clearly loved it though she then said she had to ignore the words since she has trouble with all religious stories. I was kind of amused by this since I had been wishing they had used surtitles for the Latin text. I suggested that perhaps she could just think of it as a mother mourning a son tortured to death by the authorities. "No, I just want to hear it as sound, all sound." The sounds were indeed beautiful, and conveyed their own meaning.

The San Francisco Symphony battles the Boyg

Last Thursday I was at Davies Hall for the first time this season, for San Francisco Symphony's Peer Gynt program, which combined actors and singers and video projections in a traversal of Ibsen's great play, along with some of the orchestral music written for it (including sections of Grieg's famous score, written at Ibsen's request, and more recent pieces by the late Alfred Schnittke and by Robin Holloway, who was there in person). This program had jumped out at me when the season was announced about a year ago. Ibsen's play, the last he wrote in verse before turning to the prose plays that helped create modern theater, isn't staged very often, mostly because (like its obvious model, Goethe's Faust) it's very long and very weird, combining realistic social drama, the supernatural, political satire, dream and fantasy sequences, myth-making and intimate psychological analysis, working as both biography and allegory.

Key Ibsen themes run through it: an intense examination of the roles men and women play in relation to each other (and how natural urges battle against social structures), the influence of one generation on another, the role of the dreamer or idealist in a workaday world, the danger and the necessity of one's illusions and delusions. Peer is a fascinating character: sort of an Everyman (which doesn't mean he's likable, exactly, though I don't find him unsympathetic) as well as an outsider; a dreamer who achieves (and loses) great worldly success; he's a habitual liar who spins out great fantastic adventures that enthrall his listeners, even those who realize he's repeating stories they told him, but he also can tell blunt and cruel truths that others don't want to hear (as when he runs off with Ingrid on her wedding day; shortly thereafter he tires of her and she berates him, but he points out that she was completely willing to run off with him and he doesn't owe her anything - if she expected him to turn into a solid bourgeois husband, well, who's the delusional dreamer in that pair?). He's a selfish man who is constantly, desperately, seeking to hold on to his self.

I have seen the play performed live: ACT did it some time in the early to mid-1970s. I believe it was either complete or nearly complete (I think it was around four hours, which was a bit much for the other high school students with whom I saw it). At this point I don't remember much about the production except for the scene in which Peer's mother Ase dies. And now available on DVD there's a version starring a seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston in his first film. Directed by David Bradley, it's mostly silent with Grieg as the soundtrack. It's an amateur film, shot in Michigan and featuring mostly local college students. It's surprisingly effective, and Heston is very good: lots of times I'd look at the other actors and think, you're really an American college student from the 1940s in fancy dress, but I always thought of him as Peer. There's also a ballet version, which is where the Schnittke music comes from. In short, it's a story that, for various reasons, mostly practical, is often shortened or adapted.

I re-read it before the Symphony show. I'm never sure if that's an advantage or not in these situations: it brings fresh knowledge and context to what I'm seeing, but also makes me maybe too aware of what's been cut or changed. Quite a lot was cut to fit the story within a normal symphonic evening of slightly over two hours. In the spirit of the original play, the Symphony's performance was wide-ranging and episodic, even a bit disconnected; disappointing decisions jostled next to brilliant successes; sometimes it seemed like a play with eruptions of music, and other times like an orchestral piece interrupted by dialogue. I gathered from those around me on Thursday that there was a wide range of reactions, from enthralled to appalled. I've dropped out of most discussions and held off on reading most  reviews until I posted this, but I gather that they cover as wide a range. On the whole I enjoyed the evening quite a lot, despite some reservations. But if the evening wasn't a total success, it was at least the right sort of failure (well, I didn't think it was a failure at all, but you see what I mean): ambitious, thoughtful, new, and creative. Peer Gynt was a particularly bold choice for the Symphony, since I suspect it appeals more to serious theater-goers than to symphony-goers, and there is less overlap among those audiences than one might expect or hope for.

The things I didn't like: the actors were brutally amplified. I've complained about amplification frequently; it flattens the sound and tends to make people sit back rather than lean forward. I do understand that Davies is acoustically tricky and there might be problems with unmiked spoken dialogue in that cavernous space, but two people talking in a normal tone should not be louder than a symphony orchestra. The smashing sound of a large orchestra is one that, sadly, we can't appreciate as much as nineteenth-century audiences did, since all you have to do now is turn the dial up. But at times the volume of the actors shoved the orchestra too far into the background.

Having embraced the evil technology of amplification, the Symphony really should embrace the good technology of surtitles. I've never understood why they don't use them regularly. When the chorus joined in as awesome trolls in Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, it was unclear if they were singing words that meant something or just troll-like sounds.The dialogue was in English, but when Solveig sang, as when the trolls sang, it's back to the original Norwegian, and - well, how many fluent Norwegian speakers are in the usual Bay Area audience? At least Joelle Harvey's lovely singing was not amplified. (Solveig is basically Peer Gynt's Marguerite, to continue the Faust analogy, with the added acerbic twist that at the end, during his ambiguous redemption (or, possibly, his indefinitely deferred damnation), it is strongly implied that the reason he has no Self is because he wasn't more like her - selflessly loving and giving; as several religious traditions hold, in order to gain yourself, you must lose yourself.)

I wish the play-pruning hadn't been so severe in some sections; in particular, Peer's dead father, a genial drunkard who pissed away the family fortune, is important to understanding him, and most of the references to him were gone. There was enough with his mother to give you a sense of their relationship, so Ase's death had the power it should have. But most of the play after her death up until the appearance of the mysterious Button-Molder was gone. It was replaced by what was basically a tone-poem by Holloway, which I enjoyed, but if the action is cut then the music makes its own journey, which may or may not be the journey on which Ibsen sent his protagonist. Having the play fresh in my mind, and assisted by the beautiful projections, I could tell when Peer was in the desert or on his ocean voyage, but Ibsen's words shape and suggest the meanings of those travels in a way you wouldn't necessarily get from the music unless you knew the play well. I enjoyed Holloway's piece, which slips easily among sounds and moods, but it was a bit out-sized: it replaced roughly a third of the play, and at around 25 minutes it was easily the longest single piece of music in the performance. There was a repeated melody that sounded to me like a bit straight out of Peter and the Wolf. When the Symphony performed excerpts from Holloway's opera Clarissa, the fire was represented by a very extensive quotation of Walkure's Magic Fire music, so that sort of quotation is a thing Holloway does, but I'm not sure what was going on there.

When the Woman in Green (the Troll-King's daughter, played by Peabody Southwell) re-appears with Peer's son, she is supposed to be an ugly old woman - that's why Peer doesn't recognize her at first. But on Thursday she was just as uber-hot as in her first appearance, so it didn't make sense that Peer claimed not to recognize her. I wouldn't have had the Boyg chuckle with horror-movie menace: that gives it a certain malevolent definition, and I think the enigmatic blankness of the formless, unseen Boyg is what makes it so terrifying and haunting. (Is it something inside Peer, or outside? Is it trying to destroy him with its advice, or help him?) The program note claims that the Boyg also appears as the Button-Molder, the lean priest, and the ghastly passenger on Peer's voyage home: it's unclear from the phrasing if this is specifically Schnittke's interpretation or is being put forward as inherent in Ibsen. I think it's a possible but not a necessary interpretation, and personally I feel the Boyg is separate in function and meaning from those other characters (the ghastly ghostly passenger, by the way, fell victim to the extensive cutting).

On to the things I did like. The actors, despite having to work against the amplification, were all strong. Ben Huber showed Peer's uncertainty and longing as well as his headstrong fantastical ways, and moved convincingly from wild boy to cynical man. Rose Portillo as his mother captured Ase's love for and frustration with and complaining about and defense of her wayward boy. In addition to the ones I've already named, there was also good work by Jesse Merlin as Solveig's Father and the Troll King, Brian Ruppenkamp as the Brat and the Lean One, Mark Deakins as the Boyg and the Button-Molder, Janice Lancaster Larsen as Ingrid, and Keith Perry, Alexandra Sessler, and Dianne M. Terp as wedding guests. James Darrah was director and production designer, and Adam Larsen was video designer.

I loved the chance to hear so much of the possible Peer music; I knew the Grieg but not the others. It was always immediately clear which of the three composers was being performed, and that eclecticism is very much in the spirit of the play. I loved Schnittke's eerie vaporous Boyg music. Grieg's Morning Mood sounded as fresh and lovely as sunrise on a spring meadow, the way it was meant to sound before it became a cartoon signifier of spring dawn. It was great to hear the Hall of the Mountain King with chorus. I loved the vast irregular white shape on which the projections were shown; it looked like both mountains and mist. The projections themselves were striking and well done, moving from black-and-white to color and from church interior to lush forest to vast ocean and many points in between. The long narrow stage space was used well, with the occasional addition of action up the aisles.

Mostly, I just really love that they did this at all.

Home and the World with Esa-Pekka Salonen

For the past three or so years - ever since Matias Tarnopolsky took over - Cal Performances has had an annual residency from a visiting orchestra. This year we had renowned composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. I heard the last of their three concerts, the Mahler 9, but before that I heard the "composer portrait" concert dedicated to Salonen's music. He was of course there in person and Tarnopolsky interviewed him on stage during pauses in the intermissionless performance. The first part of their talk reflected some of the information also in the program book, but later on Salonen became more expansive and even offbeat.

There were four different pieces: knock, breathe, shine for solo cello (Kacy Clopton), Homunculus for string quartet (here the Calder Quartet), Dichotomie for solo piano (Gloria Cheng), and Mania for cello (Clopton again) and a small orchestra (here the University's Eco Ensemble). There was a nice variety of sound and style among the pieces, even when the underlying sensibility was clearly the same; there were several moments that sounded - I can only say "exotic," like moonlight on shifting desert sands. Salonen likes to play with the considerable virtuosity of his performers. In his remarks Salonen talked a bit about some of the initial conceptions or technical notions that expanded into the various pieces. Homunculus, for example, came from the early theory of human conception which held that each sperm contained a very miniature but fully formed man (with the implication that inside the tiny man's tiny sperm was an even tinier man with even tinier sperm containing an even tinier tinier man, and so on ad infinitum): so this quarter-hour for string quartet was meant to contain in compact form all the changes of sound and texture that you might find in a bigger piece. This was my favorite of the four pieces, though I enjoyed them all thoroughly. Also it was a pleasure to be in the midst of an attentive audience, after a series of recent evenings in which idiots kept pulling out their phones during the performance. You'd think that new music concerts would tend to draw only people who wanted to be there, but there was my first experience with the Eco Ensemble, that Boulez concert, where the audience was strangely awful.

During his remarks Salonen paid touching tribute to Elliott Carter, who had recently died just when we were all thinking he would outlive us all - Salonen mentioned giving an interview in which he talked about different schools and generations of composers, "and then there's always Elliott Carter" - just when there no longer was Elliott Carter. He also spoke of the need he had as a young composer to fight against the established models; in his case, he fought against Sibelius. Then one day in Milan after rehearsals he happened to come across a pocket score of one of the Sibelius symphonies, and he realized its greatness. He saw this as part of the normal process of maturation for a composer, in which you progress from rebel against the establishment to part of the establishment yourself; and that was part of his commitment to working with young composers and performers. He also mentioned his theory that (I think I have this right) originally language and music were the same thing, the basic and in-born means of communication (on the grounds that all human society creates music) and then gradually evolved in separate directions as language needed to create territorial and personal distinctions - so I guess the implication is that both are basic human urges; music is communal, language less so.

Sunday afternoon was the Mahler 9. Zellerbach is not the greatest concert hall for orchestras, but then neither is Davies and, at least on Sunday, the audience was amazingly quiet and attentive - there was some loud coughing towards the end, and as I heard someone in the audience say afterward, "They could at least try to stifle it a bit," and yes indeed, but a bit of coughing isn't too bad during ninety solid minutes of intense music. And when a woman in my row very briefly flipped through her program I realized that the program-flipping omnipresent at Davies was not taking place: people were actually sitting there listening to music. The magnificence of the performance deserved such attention. It seemed irrelevant to talk of the quality and skill of the orchestra, they moved so far beyond such virtues, bringing out the whole vast universal expanse of Mahler's final symphony. Worlds were created and passing away moment by moment, right in front of our ears.

At the end as he took his bows Salonen was visibly exhausted; nonetheless he came back after a short break and led the UC Berkeley student orchestra through a run-through of La Mer. (Such work with the students is an integral part of the orchestra residencies.) I thought about staying, but for various reasons decided against it. It might have been the perfect way to ease re-entry into our little world after the Mahler, but instead I plunged into the immediate shock of public transit.

we have always lived in the castle

Continuing my trip backwards through the San Francisco Symphony centennial season. . . .

My second-to-the-last Symphony concert of the centennial season (Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle) was just a week before the finale. I did not realize it at the time but - music aside, since in that regard both evenings were wonderful - it was going to be a complete contrast as an experience to the final concert, which was a nightmare: I write about that concert, quite entertainingly I must say - that's me, spinning my straw into gold! - here.

Back to my penultimate week. It was Thursday night so the Asian Art Museum was open late and fortunately hadn't scheduled anything that would sabotage the experience for people who were actually interested in Asian art, so I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa there for dinner and a look around the galleries. The Phantoms of Asia exhibit was spread over the whole building, though we ended up spending most of our time on the top floor, in the Indian galleries. I thought there was an intriguing idea behind Phantoms of Asia - asking contemporary artists to react to the various Asian traditions and beliefs around spirituality, the afterlife, and cosmic order - but despite a few striking pieces I found the older works on display much more interesting. Perhaps if I had been able to pay more than two fairly brief visits to the show I would have felt differently.

Anyway, on to Symphony Hall. The program opened with Jeremy Denk playing the Liszt, which seemed like luxury casting. Liszt often gets paired with Bartok, I guess because they're both Hungarian, though there is also the entertaining contrast between the former's heavenly rhapsodies (edging into that sort of ethereal spirituality which always seems really sexual) and the latter's more astringent and earthy sound. The Piano Concerto No. 1 is fairly short (about twenty minutes) with a cascading dazzle of sound that for me evoked heavy rain falling through leaves onto a window pane - and then persistently BEEP BEEP BEEP and what the hell is that? I half expected Tilson Thomas to stop the performance and wheel around like a hawk, only it didn't seem to be a device in the hall (and apparently people further back couldn't hear it at all). I think it was something - an exit or a smoke detector or wahtever- in the hall outside the auditorium. Too bad. This was one of the better audiences I've experienced in Davies (no one around me was talking, texting, unwrapping cellophane, flipping noisily through the program, kicking the back of my seat, or squeezing me in so I couldn't breathe) - how perverse of the cosmos to insist that something had to be disruptive.

They must have fixed the BEEP BEEP BEEP right before the intermission because there was no sign of it during or after the break. Denk was pretty wonderful, as was the orchestra, and I feel I should say something more perceptive, or at least appreciative, since obviously a lot of work and sweat and thought goes into tossing off Liszt with easy virtuosity, but honestly serving as the opening amuse-bouche for Duke Bluebeard's Castle is a thankless task.

Into the Castle. This performance included the usually omitted opening narration, spoken by Ken Ruta. The music begins before the narration ends, which means you mostly want the speaker to shut up so you can listen to the music - you know, the usual. I can see why this bit is usually omitted. I hardly remember what the speaker says, and that's not because I'm writing this a few months later; I had forgotten it by the time the concert ended. I just remember it had sort of an ooga-booga Grand Guignol tone that to me signaled "campy horror film" rather than "richly textured, thought-provoking music drama."

Alan Held and Michelle DeYoung were both in strong, striking voice, and the orchestra was both lush and crystalline. The production was semi-staged, but I have no comment on the staging since I couldn't see it. I was in the second row, and the singers were placed behind the orchestra, so given the height of the Davies stage compared to the front orchestra seats the singers were blocked from view except for a few occasions when I'd spot them through a thicket of violas like jungle cats through a tangled underbrush, but those sightings were only sporadic. There were some large vaguely triangular white shapes moving around occasionally above the stage and there were projections, generally of a pretty basic descriptive sort: fields of flowers, close-ups of water dripping down walls, blood, stuff like that. It didn't add a whole lot but it also didn't detract. The projections were kind of a stripped-down version of the visually richer ones that Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera) used in its production a few years ago.

This is a really wonderful short opera and should be done more often. For one thing, I take away different impressions every time I see it, which is a sign of a work worth revisiting. Usually I think of the Bluebeard story as very much the wife's story: her love for him, her fear and confusion over the castle's (and his) mysteries, her intellectual curiosity, her bravery in entering and confronting his world. This time it struck me as very much about him, very much the story of a man trapped inside his own mind (this should not be read as Held overpowering DeYoung dramatically, since both were perfectly matched; it's just a matter of noticing something different in a work). As with the protagonist of Die Tote Stadt, even Bluebeard's efforts to reach out only amount to drawing someone else into his painful psychic labyrinth, and there Judith remains with his other wives. Has he literally killed her? Has he psychically killed her? Does she sacrifice herself? Or is it merely an image of her, a memory of what she was to him, that remains? Over in the Indian art galleries before the concert we saw a manuscript painting showing Krishna as a cowherd. For reasons that currently escape me he has to prove to someone who he is. He opens his mouth and the person who demanded his identity staggers back, because inside Krishna's mouth, briefly, one sees the entire universe. And that was how Bluebeard struck me: as a man with the entire universe expanding inside him. What does that leave for those on the outside?

Clash of the Titans

There's something about a "collected works" that I've always found irresistible. Sometimes I will hesitate for a while, but generally I cave in, and rarely do I regret it. So last March I ordered the Toscanini Complete RCA Collection. It finally showed up mid-July, after several months in which the release date kept getting pushed back (no idea why) and the price fluctuated with a stock-market wildness. Luckily I bought low.

The first record I listened to obsessively was a Toscanini disc belonging to my mother. I was equally obsessed with both sides: one had Gershwin's An American in Paris and the other Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 in D Major, the Classical. It was only much, much later that I realized both pieces were very unusual repertory for Toscanini.

For old time's sake I found the Gershwin first and listened to it. This performance is so ingrained on my memory that for me it is the piece, so I don't really have any very illuminating second thoughts; it's clear and jaunty, with a lot of rhythmic snap and forward propulsion, and as irresistible as ever. The rest of the disc has some Americana-type pieces as well as American classics like the Barber Adagio, but I just listened to the Gershwin a couple of times. I would have preferred hearing it with the Prokofiev (which I assume is somewhere in the box). I will now go back to Disc 1 (Beethoven 1 and Beethoven 3) and work my way through the rest, always keeping an eye out for the yet-unseen Prokofiev.

When the Furtwangler "Legacy" set came out last year I considered it but decided I already had a substantial number of the recordings so I could skip it. But once I had the Toscanini I started to think I should give equal play to his fellow Olympian (plus I could always sell duplicate discs to Amoeba or Rasputin's), so I went ahead and bought the Furtwangler, which arrived about a week after the Toscanini.

As sometimes happens, two great artists with complementary energies rose at roughly the same time. Their lives and their struggles against the oppressive politics of their time took very different paths, but whenever I am being driven crazy by someone else loudly playing recorded music, which is often, I remind myself how lucky I am to live in a time when the great souls of these physically dead artists are available with miraculous ease in these neat little boxes, waiting for whoever cares to hear them.

In fact it's almost too easy to get this stuff these days, too easy to take it all for granted, or to load up on tempting items that sit on already over-crowded shelves, waiting their turn. I bought the Liszt complete piano music set well over a year ago, and am only two-fifths of the way through that bad boy. If only we had separate lifetimes to absorb fully each thing we need to absorb, but incompletion seems to be our fate.

Beethoven waves us off

Running in place trying to keep up though always falling behind as usual, I might as well start with the final concert I heard in the San Francisco Symphony's centennial season and work backwards through some symphonic nights. . . .

My ticket for the big season finale was for the Thursday performance, so my original plan was to spend the time after work and before the concert at the Asian Art Museum taking a closer look at the Phantoms of Asia show. Unfortunately for me, that Thursday turned out to be one of the museum's silly and annoying monthly party nights, though I guess it was fortunate I found out beforehand so I could give the museum a very wide berth, since this particular party featured (1) "litquake," (2) Trannyshack, (3) some tattoo thing, and (4) a DJ. Any one of those four elements would have sent me screaming into the dark night, but the combination of all four promised to fill the museum with enough smug self-regard and general hipster-douchebag-asshattery to reach suffocatingly toxic levels. In fact the slightest event - a carelessly dropped name, the fizz when some inked hackjob popped open his ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon - could easily react with some dragonish drag queen's acid "Oh honey" or the shrill relentless thumping of trendoid world music to trigger an implosion in the building that would bring it crashing down (as Samson brought the temple crashing down on the heads of the Philistines), with nothing surviving in the wreck except perhaps some fragment of an unobserved impassive Buddha, his hand raised in ambiguous blessing, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.

So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.

Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.

I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.

There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.

During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.

I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.

I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.

The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.

And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.

Hungarians and holiness at the Berkeley Symphony

Several Thursdays ago I went to the Berkeley Symphony’s season finale in Zellerbach. They invited me, which was very nice of them, and since they offered me two tickets I was going to take ABW. Her back went out the day before the concert and since she could barely walk to the bathroom she sure wasn’t going to make it across the Bay on BART, so that was a shame. I tried to find another taker, but of course when most people hear that something is on a weeknight and doesn’t start until 8:00 they’ll just turn you down flat. I did end up making productive use of the second ticket, giving it to a friend who was trapped, as he put it, “next to a very large gentleman.” I was glad that I did not also qualify as very large, especially after my beer and pizza dinner at Jupiter, which was not only delicious, but helped to kill at least some of the time beforehand, pizza being one of those things that requires a fair amount of time. After that I moseyed over to Moe’s Books, where I spent about an hour (which still got me to Zellerbach about an hour before the concert started). I walked out of there with a copy of Thackeray’s Paris Sketch Book, Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (romance among the parish choir!), Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead (relics!), and the New York Times Book Review, which I bought for the cover story on the new edition of Philip Larkin’s poems, an article which, I have just realized, has been sitting unread in the bag since I bought it, because that is the way my life is lived.

The concert was titled A Hungarian Excursion, though that only covered the Bartok and Kodaly works in the first half; the second half was the premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Holy Sisters, Part One. Conductor Joana Carneiro had injured her shoulder in a way that made conducting impossible, so Edwin Outwater stepped in at the last minute and did a wonderful job with what couldn’t have been an easy assignment, especially since there was no way he could have seen the Holy Sisters music ahead of time. I hadn't heard this orchestra before but was impressed by their sound. There were a couple of old women behind me who were the sort who had to comment compulsively on every obvious thing that happens around them but since they managed to keep it mostly under control during the music I was able to find them amusing and colorful rather than the first potential victims of a homicidal rage. They were quite taken with the dapper Mr Outwater and commented several times on how athletic he looked bounding up and down from the podium.

Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta was very attractive, but seemed like a pops piece to me, kind of light and flowing, with scenic countryside music and an ethnic flavor for those who like to latch on to that sort of thing. That was followed by Bartok’s dreamy Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It seems to me I have heard this music somewhere else recently, but not as well played.

After the intermission we had the Frank piece, in which soprano Jessica Rivera, accompanied by the orchestra and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, sings (I’m quoting from the program) “Biblical texts arranged and adapted by Jose Tolentino de Mondonca (with further arrangements by Nilo Cruz and Gabriela Lena Frank)." The texts all center around women: Rachel, Sarah, Miriam the Prophetess, Hannah mother of Samuel, Mary of Magdala. Frank spoke beforehand. Sometimes an artist’s remarks are illuminating and interesting (and in fact I avoid readings unless the author is going to talk about and around his or her work; I mean, if it’s just reading the words on the page, I can stay home and do that myself). But generally I’m not a big fan of having composers telling us what they were trying to do when we could instead be listening to what they actually did. I also feel that if you’re not going to start your concert until 8:00, you shouldn’t take up time with this sort of thing. Frank seems very genial but I found her talk pointless, since it was all about how the piece came to be commissioned, in the sort of insidery tone that makes me feel very much like an outsider, and which is in any case mostly irrelevant to a listener, and anyway I had already read all the information in the program.

As for the piece itself, I enjoyed it, finding it smoothly flowing with a gentle radiance, but I also found it too unvaried in tone and mood for its length (roughly half an hour) and for the variety of women included. There was some vague reference in the talk or the program to the piece being about “women’s spirituality,” but the notion of some universal, one-size-fits-all spirituality generic to women strikes me as both improbable and uninteresting. Perhaps when Part Two is added the work will go in a different direction. The woman two seats over from me paged through her program for the duration, getting louder and louder with each flipped page. I have no idea what she was looking for, or if she ever found it, or why she was there at all when she was so afraid to listen.

(The pictures are all of the UC Berkeley campus.)

if this is how the world ends, I hope the Mayans were right about 2012

I was at last night's magnificent and thrilling San Francisco Symphony performance of the Verdi Requiem, the mightiest of all requiem masses. Sure, I could quibble about a thing or two, but don't want to; this was as good as it gets. Thanks to conductor James Conlon, soloists Sondra Radvanovksy, Dolora Zajick, Frank Lopardo, and Ain Anger, and most definitely to the SF Symphony Chorus and the Symphony itself, for a rendition that was awesome in both the slang and the strict senses of the word.

(The jaunty joints of this tall fellow were suspended above the staircase last night, but I suspect the Requiem was a coincidence and he is actually waiting for Halloween/the Day of the Dead.)

death dreams at Davies

Last Friday, thanks to the very kind offices of Mr G/S Y, I had a front-row center ticket at the SF Symphony to hear James Conlon conducting Shostakovich’s Symphony 14 (with soloists Olga Guryakova and Sergei Leiferkus), followed by the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition.

The evening got off to a rocky start when Conlon suddenly wheeled around and blathered for ten minutes before starting the music. I have no idea why he thought this filler was necessary, since the Shostakovich 14 is nearly an hour long, and wasting ten additional minutes just ends up making me aware of how uncomfortable the seats are in Davies Hall. Luckily for me there was no one on my right so I wasn’t as crammed in as usual. Just to show I’m not completely doctrinaire about the conductor-blathering thing, I’ll say that a few years ago I did like the little speech before the Ligeti Requiem, comparing it to a poem by Rilke, given by Michael Tilson Thomas, who is usually one of the worst offenders, so go figure.

But he probably figured the music was a bit of a stretch for most of the Symphony audience (which is one of the reasons I hate the little talks – anything even slightly out of the norm is condescendingly assumed to be beyond our grasp without a babying little pep talk beforehand, as if there weren’t already a program book full of notes and a pre-concert lecture; the result is that the little chat signals that we’re about to get the musical equivalent of fiber and vegetables, instead of something wonderful and new that we should be excited to hear), and quoting Rilke offers us an equivalent way of approaching the work. Conlon unfortunately went for the usual glibness conductors generally use in these talklets, as if they were all pre-fabricated in some condescension factory, and as usual this approach set exactly the wrong tone for the sarcastic, bleakly harrowing and beautiful death-haunted music that followed.

And since I’m complaining – the Symphony inexplicably still does not use surtitles for vocal works. You know, I don’t care if they’re tweeting and on Facebook or whatever – here is an already well-established technological innovation that (let me emphasize this) actually serves the music rather than some bogus sense of trendoid social-fake-networking. So why aren’t they using surtitles? I’ve seen them used for staged operas in Davies, so why not for something that is essentially an hour-long song cycle? The words – Russian versions of poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Rilke, and Kuchelbecker – are important here. And it might help reduce the constant program-shuffling and -folding, which went on throughout the performance, even though there seemed to be a fair number of Russian-speakers in attendance.

Despite these off-putting and unnecessary Symphony-inflicted drawbacks, this was a pretty wonderful concert. These were the first performances of this work by the San Francisco Symphony, which isn’t as surprising as it might seem since the barn that is Davies is not really suitable for this intimate, almost chamber-music-like work. I have absolutely no idea what the effect was in the back rows of the balconies. I just know that it was very powerful up close. I was practically at the feet of Guryakova, a young blonde soprano who has an appealingly icy beauty of person and voice. She looks like a young Meryl Streep. Hitchcock would have loved her. As she sang her eyes stared over our heads and glittered strangely and fiercely like the blue-green jewels hanging from her ears.

She and Leiferkus were superlative throughout, as was the reduced orchestra. The full band was on stage after intermission for the Mussorgsky/Ravel, which was grand and majestic, though I’m not sure grandeur and majesty are necessarily what best suits this piece. It was quite enjoyable, but almost in an overeating-chocolates way. The Shostakovich certainly was more than enough to stand satisfyingly on its own.